DarylCagle.comHere’s a new batch of my old TRUE cartoons. This first one is a self-portrait of younger me, sitting on the toilet, talking on my land-line rotary phone. Looking at the old True cartoons makes me feel young again, until I notice details that make me feel old.
Most of this new batch of my old TRUE panels came from my collection about entertainment and celebrities. I ended up killing most of these cartoons because they were so stale. I forget how different things were back in 1995. This edited batch of cartoons makes 1995 seem not so different from today – even though one cartoons shows a guy reading a book on the toilet; we may not read books anymore, but toilets haven’t changed much.
Star Trek is still familiar 23 years later. Mattel’s Barbie is still popular, but other toys in my TRUE cartoons are forgotten – for example Barney the Dinosaur was big in 1995. I forgot all about Barney. The first cartoon below is about Lassie, who we remembered as a doggie celebrity back in 1995. Do people remember Lassie now?
The missile alert in Hawaii last weekend was pretty crazy, with people calling their loved ones to say goodbye, and others jumping into sewers.
I spent my first years as an editorial cartoonist working for newspapers in Hawaii doing local cartoons, first for the Midweek, then for Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser – now my cartoons run in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Hawaiian politics are wonderful fodder for editorial cartoons. I miss those days.
I used to fill my cartoons with local details. My wife went to Punahou school with Barack Obama, back in the day, and she would translate my cartoons into pidgin so I wass able to fool everyone into thinking I was a local. The missile alert was a horror for Hawaii but was a bit of cartoon nostalgia for me.
Editorial page editors typically reject anything new and different from editorial cartoonists. Unusual styles and formats are just not what editors want to see. Editors like cartoons that look like what they think editorial cartoons should look like – which leads to lots of cartoons that look much the same.
I’ve been a big fan of Andy Singer’s self-syndicated, altie “No Exit” panel for years, and I’ve been encouraging Andy to try his hand at more traditional editorial cartooning. Andy’s panel has content that is socially conscious, like an editorial cartoon, but it is not the right shape, and it is wordy, and it doesn’t have caricatures of politicians and the panel format with a title is simply not something editorial page editors will consider putting in their daily editorial cartoon hole.
What to do? Andy wanted to be on the editorial pages but was committed to continuing the “No Exit” panel. Then he gave me a new pitch, saying, “Daryl, you know, when I put two of my panels next to each other it becomes the shape of an editorial cartoon, and if I do two panels that are on the same topic, and color them, it looks like one big editorial cartoon.” The idea looked interesting to me. The result is rather stylistically different than what editors are used to but Andy’s new editorial cartoon format looks like wordy, multi panel editorial cartoons, and editors seem to be accepting them. The connection between the two panels might be a stretch, but no one seems to notice. So far, so good.
A number of comic strip cartoonists, Like Dan Piraro and Wiley Miller, have been doing their cartoons in both strip and panel format for years. Andy’s work has some format advantages over most magazine gag cartoonists’ work; Andy’s panels are topically editorial cartoons to start with, and he doesn’t have a classic gag cartoon style with a caption at the bottom, which would be more difficult to reformat. Still, it may be that some other socially conscious panel or gag cartoonists could develop a new market by finding a procedure to reformat their ongoing work as editorial cartoons. Andy Singer is the trailblazer.
Here are a couple more new editorial cartoons from Andy. Follow Andy’s work on Cagle.com here.
The latest deadline for the nuclear deal with Iran is fast approaching, with both side optimistic that a deal will be made, and both side describing the deal very differently.
